“Oh, I didn’t exactly commit a murder,” the other laughed, “but I fell down, Sla—you don’t mind my calling you Slady, do you?”
“That’s what most everybody calls me,” Tom said, “except the troop I was in. They call me Tomasso.”
“Sounds like tomato, hey?” Hervey laughed. “No, my troubles are about merit badges. I’ve bungled the whole thing up. When a fellow goes after the Eagle award, he ought to have a manager, that’s what I say. He ought to have a manager to plan things out for him. I tried to manage my own campaign and now I’m stuck—with a capital S.”
“How many merits have you got?” Tom asked him.
“Twenty,” Hervey said, “twenty and two-thirds. Just a fraction more and I’d have gone over the top.”
“You mean a sub-division?” Tom asked.
“That’s where the little but comes in,” Hervey said. “B-u-t, but. It’s a big word, all right, just as you said.”
“Is it architecture or cooking or interpreting or one of those?” Tom asked.
Hervey glanced at Tom in frank surprise.
“Maybe it’s leather work, or machinery, or taxidermy or marksmanship,” Tom continued, with no thought further from his mind than that of showing off.